Akira Toriyama (Kiyosu, April 5, 1955 – March 1, 2024) was the creator of Dragon Ball and one of the most influential manga artists of all time. His clean line, his love of machines and his irresistible sense of humor shaped generations of readers and artists, in Japan and around the world. Beyond comics, he gave a face to entire video game worlds, from Dragon Quest to Chrono Trigger, and kept writing Goku's stories until the very end.
Childhood and first job
Born in Kiyosu, in Aichi Prefecture, Toriyama drew from an early age, mostly animals and vehicles, lifelong passions of his. He remembered being blown away by Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians and named Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy as the original spark for his interest in manga. As a kid he also loved monster movies like Gamera and the Ultraman TV series.
After a high school focused on design, and against his parents' wishes, he skipped further studies and spent three years at an advertising agency in Nagoya, designing posters. He picked up the job quickly, but was often late and got scolded for dressing too casually. Tired of the routine, he quit.
Early work
Unemployed at 23, Toriyama entered an amateur contest he had found in a magazine at a coffee shop. His work ended up in the hands of Kazuhiko Torishima, an editor at Weekly Shōnen Jump: it was a Star Wars parody and could not compete, but Torishima sent him a telegram encouraging him to keep drawing. His first published story, Wonder Island, came out in 1978 and finished last in the reader survey. A year of rejections followed, around 500 pages by his own count, until Torishima asked him to try a female lead: the result, Tomato the Cutesy Gumshoe, was his first modest hit.
Dr. Slump
The breakthrough came with Dr. Slump (1980–1984), the comedy of Penguin Village, a bumbling inventor and his tiny but super-strong robot girl Arale. In 1981 the series won the Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen manga and became an anime on Fuji TV's Wednesday 7 p.m. slot: that time slot would host adaptations of Toriyama's work, from Dr. Slump to Dragon Ball, for eighteen years straight. The manga is full of real people, from his assistants to Torishima himself, reimagined as the villainous Dr. Mashirito.
In those years Toriyama married Yoshimi Katō, a former manga artist who sometimes helped on his pages, and founded Bird Studio, a play on his name, since "tori" means bird in Japanese.
Dragon Ball
Knowing how much he loved kung fu movies, Torishima suggested a martial arts manga. The first attempt was Dragon Boy (1983), which grew into Dragon Ball: serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1984 to 1995, it runs 519 chapters collected in 42 volumes. The story moves from a comic adventure inspired by Journey to the West to the epic battles that defined the shōnen genre; Toriyama did not plan ahead and drew it week by week. The manga was one of the main reasons Jump hit its record circulation of 6.53 million copies in 1995, and it spawned the anime series, from Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Z. Our Dragon Ball manga guide covers it in depth.
Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger
Again thanks to Torishima, in 1986 Toriyama designed the characters and monsters for the first Dragon Quest. He admitted he did not even know what an RPG was, but he enjoyed the finished game, and he went on to work on every installment of the series until his death. The process never changed: Yuji Horii sent rough sketches and background notes, and Toriyama redrew them. His Slime has become one of the most recognizable mascots in gaming.
In 1995 he designed the characters of Chrono Trigger for the Super Famicom, followed by the PlayStation fighters Tobal No. 1 and Tobal 2 and, in 2006, Blue Dragon, reuniting with Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu.
After Dragon Ball: Sand Land and Jaco
Once Dragon Ball was over, Toriyama focused on short works: Cowa! (1997–1998), Kajika (1998), Sand Land (2000), the self-parody Neko Majin and Cross Epoch (2006), a crossover with Eiichiro Oda. He collaborated with his friend Masakazu Katsura, designed a one-seat electric car and distanced himself from the American film Dragonball Evolution (2009), which he said he could not call Dragon Ball.
In 2013, for Jump's 45th anniversary, he published Jaco the Galactic Patrolman, which turns out to be a Dragon Ball prequel: it was the last manga he both wrote and drew himself. In 2024 he created a new story arc for the Sand Land anime series.
The return with Super
In 2013 Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods brought Goku back to theaters after seventeen years, with Toriyama involved from the script stage; for Resurrection 'F' (2015) he wrote the screenplay himself. He then provided the core plot outlines and many designs for Dragon Ball Super, both the TV series and the manga drawn by Toyotarō. Broly (2018) and Super Hero (2022) continued this new phase, the latter being his last complete work for the franchise released in his lifetime. The Super manga, now on hiatus, is covered in our Dragon Ball Super manga guide.
Daima, the final story
For Dragon Ball Daima, Toriyama wrote the story and designed characters, vehicles and monsters, ending up far more involved than planned, as he put it himself. The series premiered in October 2024, seven months after his death. His final touch on Dragon Ball is a moving detail: he asked Toyotarō to redraw the end of chapter 103 of Super so that Piccolo, as he leaves, turns to wave back at the reader.
Style
Toriyama's line is round, crystal clear and immediate. Torishima noticed early on his sound effects written in the Roman alphabet, unusual at the time, and his bold use of solid blacks, partly because as a young artist he could not afford screentone. He was a master of practicality: the Super Saiyan's blond hair, for instance, saved him inking work. He also broke the rule that the strongest characters must be the biggest, and many of his most powerful fighters are small. Critic Jason Thompson called Dragon Ball an action manga drawn by a gag manga artist. His love of cars, motorcycles, plastic models and animals, some of which inspired characters like Korin and Beerus, shows on every page. Famously private, he represented himself in comics and interviews as a little robot.
Influence on other artists
Countless manga artists name Toriyama as a model. Eiichiro Oda (One Piece) and Masashi Kishimoto (Naruto) have publicly named him as their great role model, as have Hiro Mashima, Tite Kubo and Mikio Ikemoto. In a 2010 Oricon poll he came second among the manga artists who changed the history of manga, behind only Tezuka. He received a special award at the Angoulême festival in 2013, was made a Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2019 and, in 2024, was posthumously inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame.
Death and tributes
Toriyama died on March 1, 2024, at 68, of an acute subdural hematoma. Bird Studio announced the news on March 8, after a private funeral attended only by family. Oda remembered him as the superhero of his childhood, the artist who forged an era when adults and children alike could enjoy manga and who made him dream of reaching the whole world. Kishimoto wrote that Toriyama had been his salvation and a "god of manga". Messages came from Kubo, Kōhei Horikoshi, Yoshihiro Togashi and Yuji Horii, but also from Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, French President Emmanuel Macron and the foreign ministries of China and El Salvador. In Mexico City hundreds of fans gathered to raise their hands for a collective Spirit Bomb, thousands met at the Obelisco in Buenos Aires, and in Lima more than 40 artists painted a mural over 100 meters long.
To explore his work from the beginning, the best starting point is our history of Dragon Ball.
Did you know? In 2014 entomologist Enio B. Cano named a new species of beetle Ogyges toriyamai in Toriyama's honor; another, described in the same work, is called Ogyges mutenroshii, after Master Roshi.